# Three famous verses the earliest manuscripts don't have

> The woman caught in adultery, the last line of the Lord's Prayer, and the one verse that names the Father, the Word and the Spirit as one. All three are missing from the earliest copies. Here is where each came from.

Text & Tradition · BibleBelt · https://biblebelt.app/articles/verses-the-earliest-manuscripts-dont-have

No original copy of any book of the Bible survives. Not one. Every Bible rests on copies of copies, made by hand over more than a thousand years, and the copies do not always agree.

Most of the differences are small: spelling, word order, a tired copyist's slip. A few are whole sentences. Three of those are among the best-known lines in the Bible. Your translation almost certainly marks all three, in brackets or in a footnote at the bottom of the page.

## 1. The woman caught in adultery

The scene is in John 8. Religious leaders bring a woman to Jesus and ask whether she should be stoned. His answer is one of the most quoted sentences in the Bible.

> When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”
> (John 8:7)

The passage, John 7:53 to 8:11, is missing from the earliest and best Greek manuscripts of John, including two very early papyri of the Gospel. No Greek church writer for a thousand years after Jesus treats it as part of John. The earliest Greek manuscript that has it is from the fifth century.

Where it does appear, it moves. Most copies put it after John 7:52. Others put it after 7:36, or at the very end of John. One family of manuscripts puts it in a different Gospel, after Luke 21:38.

A story that floats from place to place is the classic sign of something added later. Even so, many scholars treasure it as a genuine memory of Jesus. The textual critic Bruce Metzger wrote that it has many marks of being true to life. His reason: no strict monk would have invented a story that ends with so mild a rebuke.

> She said, “No one, sir.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.”
> (John 8:11)

## 2. "For thine is the kingdom"

Millions of people end the Lord's Prayer with "For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen." In the earliest manuscripts of Matthew, the prayer ends a line sooner.

> And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one.
> (Matthew 6:13)

The NRSVue footnote there says other ancient authorities add, in some form, "For the kingdom and the power and the glory are yours forever. Amen." The great fourth-century codices, Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, do not have it.

The closing line is ancient. It echoes King David's prayer in Chronicles, and many scholars think that is where its words came from.

> Yours, O Lord, are the greatness, the power, the glory, the victory, and the majesty, for all that is in the heavens and on the earth is yours; yours is the kingdom, O Lord, and you are exalted as head above all.
> (1 Chronicles 29:11)

Churches prayed the prayer aloud in worship and closed it with words like these. Many scholars think that spoken ending found its way into the copies.

## 3. The three witnesses in heaven

In the King James Bible, 1 John 5:7 is the one verse that names the Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit as one. In the NRSVue, the verse is shorter.

> There are three that testify: the Spirit and the water and the blood, and these three agree.
> (1 John 5:7-8)

The footnote gives the longer form: "There are three that testify in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one. And there are three that testify on earth." Scholars call those extra words the Comma Johanneum, from the Latin for "the clause in John."

No Greek manuscript from the first thousand years has them. The words first appear in a fourth-century Latin work, and probably began as a comment written in the margin of a Latin copy of 1 John. From there they moved into the Latin text itself.

Getting into the Greek took longer. In 1516 the scholar Erasmus printed the first published Greek New Testament, working fast from a small number of late manuscripts. (When his only copy of Revelation was missing its last page, he translated the final verses back into Greek from the Latin.) His first edition left the three witnesses out, because he had found them in no Greek manuscript. Critics objected. A Greek copy containing the words then turned up, probably made in Oxford around 1520 with the words taken from the Latin. Erasmus printed the passage in his third edition of 1522, with a note saying he suspected the manuscript had been made to answer him.

From Erasmus the words passed into the printed Greek text the King James translators used in 1611. Of the thousands of Greek manuscripts known today, only eight contain the passage, four of them as a note in the margin, and all are late.

## How scholars weigh a reading

It is tempting to think older always wins, or the most copies win. Neither is the rule. What matters most is how early the kind of text is, so a later copy of a very early text can outweigh an older copy of a later one. Copies from many regions that agree count for more than copies from one, and a reading found in most manuscripts can still be secondary. Scribes tended to add more than they cut and to smooth what was rough, so the harder reading often gets the benefit of the doubt. The reading that best explains how the others arose is the one scholars choose.

For these three passages, those tests agree, which is why nearly every modern Bible marks them. What a reader does with that is a separate question, and the footnote leaves it to you. Some of the same footnotes come up in [what seminary students learn](/articles/10-things-students-learn-in-seminary), and the Bible on your nightstand [already carries them](/articles/we-trust-experts-on-everything-except-the-bible). The best-known case of all, the end of Mark, has [its own article](/articles/the-end-of-mark).

## For further exploration

1. **Read John 7:52 and then jump to John 8:12.** Notice how smoothly the scene runs without the passage in between.
2. **Read the Lord's Prayer in Matthew 6:9-13 and in Luke 11:2-4.** Compare the two versions line by line.
3. **Find 1 John 5:7 in a King James Bible and in a modern translation.** Then read the footnote in the modern one.

## Sources

- John 8:7; 8:11; Matthew 6:13; 1 Chronicles 29:11; 1 John 5:7-8 (NRSVue), with the NRSVue notes at John 8:11, Matthew 6:13 and 1 John 5:7
- Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, *The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration*, on the woman taken in adultery, Erasmus and the Comma Johanneum, and the criteria for weighing readings
- Bruce M. Metzger, *A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament*, entries on John 7:53-8:11, Matthew 6:13 and 1 John 5:7-8
- *The New Oxford Annotated Bible*, notes on Matthew 6 and John 7:53-8:11

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